When you stuff marshmallows into your mouth, you do so one at a time. You don’t worry about which order they come in, you don’t organize them ahead of time, and you don’t pick them up, examine them, or ponder which ones are best before you stuff them in. In fact, you...

My wife took a look at the first version of something I was writing not long ago and said,
“Dammit, man, that’s high school stuff.”
I have to tell her to wait until the seventh draft, it’ll work out all right.
I don’t know why that should be so, that the first or second draft of everything
I write reads that way.

. . . novelists . . . have, on average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdales’s department store. our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anyone can do it. All it takes is time.